[Edu-sig] seasonal challenge to calculator dominance in high schools

Wes Turner wes.turner at gmail.com
Sun Jun 23 14:36:23 EDT 2019


On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Kirby,
>
> I think kids should write their own plotting routines to graph their
> functions starting anywhere 3rd-7th grade.
>
> In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you
> can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic
> graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP,  ... all kinds of stuff.
>

What a fun problem! Does PyGame have 2D physics? Kerbal Space Program looks
fun, too


> AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting
> software.
>

What grade levels or math and physics knowledge would you think appropriate
for these tasks?

- Specify the coordinates of the vertices of a cube
- Draw the cube in 3D (2D from a perspective)
- Rotate the cube or move the 'camera/observer's (around a point other than
the origin) in 3D space and draw each frame at time t


>
> -Charlie
>
> On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying
>> the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that
>> here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash
>> in on gullibility and impulse buys).
>>
>> This year:
>> https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_
>> Tomorrow/blob/master/Sandbox_Example.ipynb
>>
>> That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the
>> benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give
>> my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as
>> superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.
>>
>> Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right?  Sorry if I'm
>> beating a dead horse (idiom).
>>
>> Kirby
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
>
> ccosse.github.io
>
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